A_Duck

Amazon Fair Price Policy doesn't apply in the UK and EU (it's illegal)

The EU are currently running an investigation into how this affects market dynamics, which will be interesting to see

Analogous statement:

Evian use 1.25 million litres of water per employee per year. When can we expect other non-bottled-water corporations to rise to this level of water usage?

There is a real problem here to be solved.

Whenever I speak to someone who's planning to vote Reform (UK hard-right party) their views are primarily shaped by seeing AI slop videos on TikTok/Instagram, showing immigrants doing crimes etc etc

Reform will probably win the next election because of this, unless we find a way to make platforms manage the situation.

Interesting example: https://www.londoncentric.media/p/london-tiktok-fake-news-cr...

$1 removing the slash, $11,999 knowing where to remove the slash from

Substack?

If your competitor is dumping (selling for an unsustainably low price) then competing your way to bankruptcy is not the right option

What's the author trying to say here?

It's good that the law isn't the only line between good and evil. A bit of stigma is a bottom-up way for people to shape society.

If nobody invites you to dinner parties because you run a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading, that's a good thing. It's free alpha for companies doing more worthwhile things.

Payment links still seem to be working. Just the dashboard?

Crypto isn't bad because it failed to make early adopters rich — it did make them rich. It's bad because it has horrible externalities in scams, war crimes / sanctions evasion, organised crime — which most of those early adopters were well aware of.

I'm upvoting because it's useful to see and debate this viewpoint — shared by many engineers I know

I do think it's a bad take though. Not all new trends are the same: the metaverse was an obvious flop and crypto hasn't found practical applications. AI isn't like those because it's already practically changed the way I get my job done.

It takes time to learn skills, and getting started earlier will means more time to use them in your working life.

What a lovely article. There's a strong correlation between the energy you put out into the world and what you get back.

I often think that as I end up confirming a grumpy/aggressive person's expectation I'll be a bad customer, or confirming a kind/present persons's expectation I'll be a good one

Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News

Perhaps one of the secondary effects of AI replacing developers will be mobilising a group of smart, motivated people to the left

(It's always interesting to think of the secondary effects which kick in past a certain point of growth. High-multiple stock valuations often fail to take these into account. For the East India Company, for example — your company can keep growing until it's the size of a country. But suddenly other countries treat you as a foreign power rather than a pet.)

A platform where bots-pretend-to-be-humans and another where humans-pretend-to-be-bots. A match made in heaven!

Is this correct — HGVs can go faster on dual carriageways than motorways?

"UK speed limits for heavy vehicles are also more complex than most car drivers realise. Articulated trucks over 7.5 tonnes: 60 mph on dual carriageways, 50 mph on single carriageways, 56 mph (limiter) on motorways"

Not able to find a source that verifies that

The idea is to discover new things you didn’t know you wanted to know - not consume more of the same

The 'Aerospace Corporation' job ad!

"These are excellent opportunities for men ... An equal opportunity employer"

For fully remote workers, that few minutes chat before the meeting starts is one of the few opportunities for unstructured chat with their colleagues

In my own reasonableness spot check, what measures as 37dB on my phone is showing as 49dB on my laptop

Congratulations on building a nice-looking app that addresses a legitimate need.

I'd like to see some proof that this is able to accurately measure noise level across a range of devices. The CDC have a sound meter app [1] which has been tested to 2db accuracy, and they only make that available on specific Apple devices because calculating noise level depends on the hardware.

I'm sorry to ask, but I'm seeing many cases of AI apps making accuracy claims based on the author’s ‘reasonableness spot checks’ but with no statistical testing that the outputs are accurate.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/noise/about/app.html

One thing we know is that few of the people debating this have actually read Plato's Symposium

A thing you can right now do is read it (1-2 hours): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm#link2...

Or just the two sections in question:

Aristophanes’ myth of split humans (7 minutes): https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/eros/platos-other-half

Diotima’s ladder of love (20 minutes) https://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/103/jowett_symp_A.htm

Yes, it's potentially a case of a country taken in by their own propaganda

We do a lot of important and meaningful work around the world to support democracy, peace and stability. This isn't selfless — it's to create a market for goods and services, and maintain our sphere of influence.

We're so good at shouting the first bit and whispering the latter that voters have come to fully believe it's all charity work, and feel like it's taking bread out of their mouths.

The real motivation isn't geopolitical, but signalling to domestic voters that Trump is truly 'America first' and will sabotage any other country if it gets American voters an extra dollar

The resource question is a red herring: "Greenlandic ministers have also said their island is “open for business”. But US investors have been slow to show an interest in the nascent mining industry, officials say." (https://www.ft.com/content/c1c8abb1-5c09-46b0-a1d3-68341c4e5...)

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46513173

Programmable logic toys like this formed the way I see the world — a system of states, conditional flow between states and the chance to design, understand and debug the system.

I had Lego Mindstorms and Gen X had Logo/Turtle.

With AI perhaps programmable logic will go the way of toy steam engines and crystal radios, and with it the worldview of those who grew up seeing the world as logic flows

The way to ensure good code quality is: have engineers who are secure in their jobs to push back, who get time to develop and benefit from a good reputation, and who feel a strong ownership of the code

Spoiler: AI isn't going to help with any of that. I'm expecting a 'second winter of horrible codebases' (the first winter being when big companies discovered outsourcing)

I expect a second-order effect of cheap GLP-1s ending obesity will be to relieve the pressure on food manufacturers to make their products actually healthier

There are many other risks* than obesity from consuming UPFs, and we may find we've just removed the main stop-loss on worse outcomes

*Diabetes, all the biome/gut stuff which is getting better understood, colon cancer, etc etc

Explain Like I'm Hacker News

Yes, many of us have already encountered 'toxic sludge' codebases from misguided low-cost offshoring in the 2000s (offshoring can be done great but not when the only criteria is cost-saving).

There's work to be had in refactoring and taming them, but to be honest it's demoralising and thankless work, and hard to explain the value of what you've done to the people signing the checks.

(Also — this is a nicely written article with a refreshingly clear tone of voice)

Being interrogated by an AI voice app... I am so grateful I went to university in the before time

If this is the only way to keep the existing approach working, it feels like the only real solution for education is something radically different, perhaps without assessment at all

We need to go the other way and establish a social normal of clearly labelling AI outputs. It has its place but is fundamentally different to a human being expressing ideas.